Unless more rain falls, India’s ambition of becoming a vast consumer society is an impossible dream from which the vast majority will be excluded because of water shortages.
In the headlong rush to become consumers, few people inside India or outside are asking whether it is even possible for more than one billion people to adopt such the profligate and wasteful lifestyle as people in the West.
And if it is not, an enormous opportunity is being lost to sustainably raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty; instead, a wicked lie is being perpetrated against hundreds of millions of people so that just a few can become rich.
The river Ganges is one of the great rivers of the world – and it is lack of water, I believe, that will ultimately cripple the aspirations of all Indians to live decent, healthy and meaningful lives if India continues to pursues the failed model of endless consumerism.
Download complete report as PDF Goodbye Mother Ganges
25 years ago I completed a 2000-mile pilgrimage beside Ganga Ma by walking all the way from Gangha Sagar, in the Bay of Bengal, up the source at Gau Mukh, in the Himalayas. (See my book A Walk Along the Ganges.) I returned to India in the fall of 2008 keen to see how the country has changed and especially to see for myself the much-publicised development. What I found dismayed be profoundly. (Note: given the importance of the subject, I have included sources in endnotes.)
In little more than one generation, India’s most sacred river – Ganga Ma, Mother Ganges – will dry up, at least for part of every year. She will no longer be the “sur-sari” (divine flow of energy), the living entity and mother who bears away all troubles and pollutions and brings life wherever she flows. Instead, in the hot season, Ganga will become a series of stagnant pools or, at worst, a fetid sludge of industrial and domestic wastes. The river as she has been worshipped by millions of Hindus across India for thousands of years will be dead.
This is no alarmist hyperbole, but a reasonable prediction based on available facts and established trends. It is already happening to other great waterways of the world, such as the Indus, the Rio Grande, the Colorado, the Murray-Darling and the Yellow river. India is on the move. Expectations are sky high. Businesses are booming; the combination of a burgeoning consumer economy and a population set to reach almost two billion within 40 years[1] will create a thirst for water that cannot be slaked. ‘Water stress” is already happening in places all over India. Increasing shortages and conflict will be the inevitable results. As early as 2005, the World Bank was already describing India as “a country about to enter an era of severe water scarcity”[2].
My personal confirmation that something was dreadfully wrong with Ganga came when I stood on the north bank of the river near Mirzapur, a short distance upstream from the holy city of Varanasi. It was the end of the monsoon season in 2008 and Ganga Ma should have been brimful with water and fertile silt. Instead, I looked down from the high bank across a desolate scene of grey water flowing around sandbanks. The level of water should not have been so low until the start of the dry season in March. Why did the river have so little water? And if the river is so low now, what impact on water resources will the booming economy of India and transformation of society have in the face of a still rapidly increasing population? The answers are complex and discouraging. Continue Reading »
Tags: consumerism, Ganga Ma, Ganges, India, water
